Material culture: Description

The substance of comics is ink on paper, often very cheap and disposable paper. (As retail prices of new comics have risen much more than general inflation, or even the cost of their very paper, the quality of that paper has tended to improve in recent years; white bond paper is not so much more expensive than newsprint, really.) There are uncountable numbers of titles in the accumulated comics repertoire in North America, never mind Europe, Japan and the rest of the world. They are light, portable, and relatively inexpensive. They are most often periodical. Technologically, newsstand comics are the children of both newspapers and pamphlets, and they look like pamphlets or small magazines, usually with flamboyant cover art. The higher-priced bound editions look like and sell like any other kind of book.

Comic-book content comprises stories, advertisements, and occasional pieces of editorial text or reproductions of readers' letters. Most stories begin with a full recto "splash" page, looking like a small poster, that is at least as much advertisement for a story as it is an introduction to the story. Most comic periodicals contain more than one story per issue, and many stories are serialized over several issues. Contents are very often re-packaged or re-published: some of the better-known Classic Comics or Classics Illustrated titles were published in 23 different editions (same innards, modified covers) between 1941 and 1971 (Overstreet: 338).

Formally, comics are stories comprised of series of images and texts in combination. The "panels" comprise rows and columns of framed pictures, usually bordered, that may be differently arrayed on each page, and occasionally take into account an entire double spread of two facing pages. Each panel contains a picture, related in some manner to pictures before and after, and often a few words in a block or a balloon-shaped graphic device (called a balloon in English, anyway). Stories most often unfold in time, left to right and top to bottom, but as in any book, a reader can go forward or backward to skip parts or re-read others. Many comics are legible at different levels of detail and at different rates of reading.

There are uncountable genres of comics, with different but overlapping audiences. Science-fiction superheroes, light comedies, horror comics, and historical romances seem to dominate the "mainstream" in North America, but there are also religious, biographical, cruelly satirical, western, pornographic, and political comics. Indeed, there are at least as many genres as exist in the world of text, elaborated and subdivided by language, period, print quantity, print quality, and price.

There are also many styles of graphic storytelling -- combinations of artistic rendering, literary seriousness, in-jokes, and reader involvement. Pace Prown (23), they are not at all "mute objects".

DEDUCTION

SPECULATION

		Ephemeral landscapes: material culture: an analytical model Description

`back to the beginning of "MIND IN MATTER"`		The substance of comics is ink on paper, often very cheap and disposable paper. (As retail prices of new comics have risen much more than general inflation, or even the cost of their very paper, the quality of that paper has tended to improve in recent years; white bond paper is not so much more expensive than newsprint, really.) There are uncountable numbers of titles in the accumulated comics repertoire in North America, never mind Europe, Japan and the rest of the world. They are light, portable, and relatively inexpensive. They are most often periodical. Technologically, newsstand comics are the children of both newspapers and pamphlets, and they look like pamphlets or small magazines, usually with flamboyant cover art. The higher-priced bound editions look like and sell like any other kind of book. Comic-book content comprises stories, advertisements, and occasional pieces of editorial text or reproductions of readers' letters. Most stories begin with a full recto "splash" page, looking like a small poster, that is at least as much advertisement for a story as it is an introduction to the story. Most comic periodicals contain more than one story per issue, and many stories are serialized over several issues. Contents are very often re-packaged or re-published: some of the better-known Classic Comics or Classics Illustrated titles were published in 23 different editions (same innards, modified covers) between 1941 and 1971 (Overstreet: 338). Formally, comics are stories comprised of series of images and texts in combination. The "panels" comprise rows and columns of framed pictures, usually bordered, that may be differently arrayed on each page, and occasionally take into account an entire double spread of two facing pages. Each panel contains a picture, related in some manner to pictures before and after, and often a few words in a block or a balloon-shaped graphic device (called a balloon in English, anyway). Stories most often unfold in time, left to right and top to bottom, but as in any book, a reader can go forward or backward to skip parts or re-read others. Many comics are legible at different levels of detail and at different rates of reading. There are uncountable genres of comics, with different but overlapping audiences. Science-fiction superheroes, light comedies, horror comics, and historical romances seem to dominate the "mainstream" in North America, but there are also religious, biographical, cruelly satirical, western, pornographic, and political comics. Indeed, there are at least as many genres as exist in the world of text, elaborated and subdivided by language, period, print quantity, print quality, and price. There are also many styles of graphic storytelling -- combinations of artistic rendering, literary seriousness, in-jokes, and reader involvement. Pace Prown (23), they are not at all "mute objects". DEDUCTION SPECULATION
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